IIf only Angelina Jolie’s latest directorial effort, Without Blood, could be as poignant and consequential as her real-life words. If only the film about the human sacrifice of war could shed as much blood as she did.

Jolie, a filmmaker and former UN ambassador, has long been a committed activist and humanitarian. She was also one of the first and remains one of the few Hollywood stars to speak out in support of Palestinian lives and criticize the lack of humanitarian aid for innocent civilians.

She has previously made films about the Bosnian War (In the Land of Blood and Honey) and the Cambodian Civil War (First They Killed My Father), but in Without Blood she tackles Alessandro Baricco’s stubbornly vague novel about the lingering trauma of an unspecified conflict.

Baricco’s text, about a man and a woman connected across time by a brutal act of violence, resists any connection to identifiable conflict. That’s his trick for achieving universality, a faux-generous and frankly overrated gesture. Sure, it worked for Incendies, the film Without Blood most resembles. But Incendies became known more for director Denis Villeneuve’s deft narrative artistry, atmosphere and tension than for the story it told. And if the recent wave of more diverse storytellers has taught us anything, it’s that specificity helps anchor narratives in a human experience that feels authentic and universal by default.

Instead, Without Blood lets its mismatched stars Salma Hayek Pinault and Demián Bichir throw around words, anecdotes and frustratingly dull and abstract conversations that seem to be searching for meaning beyond the obvious and didactic view that war causes harm but solves nothing.

Hayek and Bichir (the latter copes a little better with the hollow material) play Nina and Tito. We can only assume they live in Mexico in the mid-’50s, although that is never stated. He is the weary operator of a kiosk. She is the mysterious woman who exudes mischievous warmth. Nina flirtatiously insists that Tito go out to dinner with her. He initially resists, before surrendering to that fateful confrontation with the woman he met as a child, when Tito was a young rebel involved in the murder of her family.

The inciting scene is one of the few poignant moments in Without Blood, as Jolie lets the violence go and lets its ugliness fester. The drawn-out standoff – in which vengeful gunmen perpetuate a cycle of violence and deliver monologues too pointed for the cast to convincingly convey – has an extremely Western feel. So does the virtuoso tracking shot at the beginning, when horsemen lasso a young man and drag him across the dirt. The violence in these early moments is so heavy that the film struggles to sustain it.

In the present, Nina and Tito take turns telling each other their stories, feeling as though they know what the other will do next. And occasionally they resort to exaggerated gestures for dramatic effect. At one moment, Hayek slowly turns a porcelain cup by the handle 180 degrees to underline a revelation. She does this with such self-satisfaction that it is almost parodic.

They unpack the sprawling narrative, which lacks clear-cut heroes or villains, largely for the audience’s benefit, detailing the cascading violence, sexual abuse, dehumanization, and trauma since their last confrontation. Tito is haunted above all by what Nina endured, and the gender divide in the way war is experienced becomes clear. Moments when Nina categorizes Tito’s existence as a display of normalcy, even as he performs basic functions and looks to his right to cross the street, transcend even if the observation seems written for film rather than life.

Without Blood often makes deliberate use of tropes. There’s the Western iconography mentioned above, along with echoes of elaborate spy thrillers or ’50s melodramas. The film, like the novel, revels in genre, perhaps as a deconstruction of the way those stories celebrate violence and heroism. Or perhaps the genre is just another refuge from the real world.

Jolie also goes all out stylistically, as if to compensate for the emptiness at the core of her lavish, sepia-toned film. Without Blood is full of exaggerated imagery, from the sentimental slow-motion scenes of golden light refracting in the lens to the glistening, wet cobblestone streets that Nina runs down in high heels toward her destination.

Surprisingly, the film achieves a strong tone in its final moment, where ambiguity works to its advantage. Jolie leaves the characters in a moment that is both comforting and unsettling, where the sense of inevitability that has defined their lives up to that moment fades and we have no idea what their intentions are or whether they know how to move on.